I reviewed some late answers and found some that weren't answers. They were either comments to other answers or questions about the same/similar issue in a "forum-style". All of them were from new users with only 1 rep.

I wrote a comment to every answer, explaining those users what they did wrong and what they should do instead and flagged the answer afterwards as "Not an answer".

So the Mods reacted quite quick and deleted all of those answers. When I now visit the profile of those new users, its absolutely blank. No answer, no comments, ...

I am not sure if they will be ever be notified about my comments and if they want to go to their answers, they have to search them without having a clue about what happened (I assume they will still see them when they find the question again).

My idea was to teach them, that they have a chance to do better next time, but this seems a bit useless to me now, or are they informed in some way that their answer has been deleted and where to find them?

3 Answers
3

First to answer your question, no, users are not notified when you leave a comment then their post is deleted. (Technically, there's a narrow time window where they might get the notification, but deletion of the post removes the notification as well.) However, the notification sticks around when moderators comment then delete the post. I comment quite a lot when I see an otherwise useful post that's just in the wrong place (e.g., a question posted as an answer), and if other users have left informative comments I'll often leave one of my own just so the notification is sticky.

If the post is something I don't want to see reposted in another form, I just delete it without commenting.

They never learn.

I try to be positive and I therefor think everybody is able to learn and to improve.
–
stemaNov 11 '11 at 13:16

5

There is no they. The path to happiness lies in knowing this. There is no they. Some of them learn. New ones come. But there is no they.
–
Kate GregoryNov 11 '11 at 13:20

4

@KateGregory: There is a They. I first glimpsed They as a darkening of the horizon, as if a storm was coming. But I soon saw it was They, stretching from the sea to the clouds; a wall of stoopid that, I knew, when it crashed against the shore would roll up the land as if it were the ocean. I turned and ran. I ran until I thought I would die and yet I did not stop. Nothing that stood in my path survived. Walls, trees, and I am ashamed to say even people. When my shoes wore out I put a baby on my left foot and a kitten on my right and kept running, and I run still. Sent from my iPhone.
–
Won'tNov 11 '11 at 13:31

If I think the user is around (for example, the answer was just a few minutes ago) I leave a comment and then go do something else for 10 or 15 minutes, then flag it. I figure that way they might get a chance to read it. If the string of words might be interpreted as an answer by someone who didn't know the subject at all (for example today I dealt with a question about "what hardware do I need to do X" and there was an answer listing all the software you needed to install, but not mentioning hardware) then I leave a comment that is as much for the moderator as anyone else. I also sometimes leave traffic cop comments for the moderator - should be a comment on the answer by @abc - to save them the trouble of figuring that out.

But if anyone can tell it's not an answer, it has no hope of going somewhere else, and the user is unlikely to be around, I just flag. It feels a little rude, but since I know they won't get to see any comment I leave, I have to accept that. Especially true for answers - there's no "this question was removed for reasons of moderation" page, the answer just disappears from the question. If it stuck around greyed out, like what a 10k sees when the user deleted it, then we would know the user would see the comments. BUT those kinds of users probably wouldn't realize the grey meant deleted.